Category: Marketing/ PR

This is a PR article I wrote on The Getaway Plan whilst interning at Warner Music Australia in the latter part of 2011.

Censorship and its Reckoning

Written for Warner Music Group Australia

September 2011

Devoting one year to a hiatus, Australian born-and-bred alternative rockers, The Getaway Plan, have returned to the music scene with a brand new album and its inaugural video, which has already rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, amounting to the “censored” sticker planted firmly across the clip for first single, entitled “The Reckoning”.

Taken off their sophomore and as yet unreleased new album, ‘Requiem’, the boundary pushing video for “The Reckoning” was lensed by renowned director Jonathan Desbiens, also known as Jodeb, who has previously worked with the likes of such metal outfits as the Deftones, Underoath and punks The New Cities. But unlike the aforementioned bands and their music videos, The Getaway Plan’s “The Reckoning” has found itself distanced from the MTV audience, whose network has banned the uncensored version of the periphery overstepping clip.

Inspired by Lars von Trier’s art-house horror film ‘Antichrist’, The Getaway Plan has kept the vision of a grotesque masterpiece in strong hold with their version and take on violence and the macabre. These are, seemingly, two concepts that are not only regurgitated, but in fact, are ones that rarely invoke any true discomfort for our desensitized society. They are, however, notions that are also kept far away from innocence, and yet, this Melbournian quartet has managed to discomfit the hardest of the population, having invoked un-innocence by the most innocent of human beings – children.

Ritualistic violence and torture see their climatic end in the murder of a child by fellow children. The almost unnatural imagery and concept represented are overtly highlighted by the scene that pushed this video from the simple macabre, to a macabre chef-d’oeuvre! The slaying of a prepubescent boy by the slashing of the throat against a backdrop of the most beautiful aesthetic and nature, has conjured up a bizarre visual that leaves the audience in a sense of confusion, together with the well expected distress and fluster.

Filmed in Toronto, Canada, the footage screams ‘international-act-with-a-big-budget’, and rightly so, as The Getaway Plan is solidifying itself as a band that is visually and musically present alongside acts renowned for pushing and stimulating its audiences.